Silver Like Dust (24 page)

While many young men from Heart Mountain did end up taking this opportunity to earn additional cash, it did have its drawbacks, the primary one being that there was never a set return date, and there was no way to get in touch with someone once they’d left.

Still, Obaachan didn’t argue with my grandfather over his decision to go to Montana. She knew better than to question his judgment, and, besides, he promised to be back in time for her due date. The two of them arranged for Obaachan’s Papa to check in on her regularly, just to make sure everything was all right. Because his apartment was on the same block, just across the dirt street that separated the rows of barracks, he could easily stop by several times a day.

As fate would have it, Obaachan’s water broke a few days after my grandfather left, one warm July afternoon, two weeks before her due date. She was at home in the apartment, in between shifts at the mess hall. She had Papa request an ambulance, and shortly thereafter, one pulled up in front of her apartment. Two men helped her struggle into the back of the ambulance and then drove her the short distance to the hospital.

Obaachan smiles as she recalls this memory. “I knew absolutely nothing about labor,” she tells me—her mother had not prepared her with a single word of explanation or warning—“so I wasn’t the least bit afraid. I’d read an article in a newspaper that told of how a baby had been miraculously born in a car on the way to the hospital, and once I’d heard about how a mother had given birth in a department store. And based on those stories, I guess I thought that when the time came, the baby just sort of slipped out.”

My grandmother’s naïveté about the realities of labor shocks me—surely she didn’t really think a baby “slipped out” when it was ready—and yet my shock is, I realize, just another sign of how vastly different the worlds we grew up in were. Obaachan had no clue what to expect on her wedding night, or how to track her cycle when she wanted to get pregnant, or even what she was getting herself into when she decided to have a baby.

I had my first sex-ed class at Alfarata Elementary in the fourth grade. The teacher split us up according to our gender, and we watched a video on how babies are made, what to expect when your first period arrived, and how to use maxipads and tampons. My grandmother, on the other hand, lived in a world where sex was not seen or discussed, where schools wouldn’t have dreamed of offering classes on sex education, and where mothers (at least
her
mother) did not give the opportunity to ask questions about menstruation or childbirth. A world in which, if a teenager got pregnant out of wedlock, she might be so ashamed that she’d give birth and leave the baby in a Dumpster—as one young girl did at Heart Mountain.

Two days after Obaachan’s labor began, things really started. “They should’ve sent me home,” Obaachan tells me. “They should’ve told me to go home and call for an ambulance when the labor pains grew stronger. Looking back, I think that’s what would’ve been best for everyone involved.”

Instead, she sat around at the hospital for two days, wandering the halls, waiting impatiently for the baby to make its appearance. When the real labor finally began, the pain was so intense and awful that she thought something must be wrong.

“I want to die!” she screamed. “Please! Just let me die! I want to die! Please!” Obaachan recreates the scene for me in her dining room, squinting her eyes, scrunching her face. (I still have trouble imagining her actually screaming that she wanted to die, but I don’t interrupt.) “And then a nurse told me, ‘Snap out of it, young lady!’ She told me I’d better start pushing because the baby was ready to come out, and I’d be better off helping it instead of bawling around.” Obaachan looks at me. “She was a tough lady, that nurse,” she says, her eyebrows raised, her mouth in a half smile. So Obaachan pushed. And pushed some more. “I was so exhausted,” she says, “but every time I wanted to give up, that unsympathetic nurse would glare at me and tell me to keep pushing.”

As my grandmother relates this story, she doesn’t mention my grandfather’s absence. She says nothing of how she was alone in that small delivery room, how in addition to her ignorance about what giving birth would be like, her husband was hundreds of miles north, not knowing she was in labor, picking sugar beets, no doubt making friends and telling stories from San Francisco or his home of Iwakuni on the Inland Sea. In the hallway outside the hospital room, Papa waited. He had been there off and on over the previous two days, when he could be, between caring for his wife and tending to his own daily chores. With only a thin wall separating him from Obaachan, he must have heard her screams.

At last she heard the cry of a baby, that pitiful, heartbreaking sound that only newborns can make. She stretched her neck to see. The formerly severe nurse had a wide smile on her face. Now that the work was over, she transformed into a different person. “Congratulations!” she said cheerfully. “You’re a mother. You now have a son.”

Although she didn’t realize it right away, it turned out that my grandmother gave birth on her own twenty-third birthday, in July of 1944. Her father reminded her when he came in to visit later that evening. Oddly, while my grandmother was in labor, Operation Valkyrie, a failed attempt by the German Resistance to assassinate Hitler—the fourth one that year—was occurring on the other side of the world. With that failure, the German Resistance nearly crumbled, and Hitler’s army would continue fighting for almost another year.

“Happy birthday,” Obaachan’s Papa said with a smile. He did not reach out to touch her, no squeeze of the hand, no reassuring hug, but he did hold the baby. On that day, as Papa held the little boy, he must have thought of his other grandson, Obaachan’s sister’s child, whom he’d seen only as a newborn, and only for a few days, right before the evacuation. By now, he was over two years old, likely babbling, certainly running and getting into things, testing his parents. What did he look like? What words did he know? Was he learning to speak both Japanese and English? Papa would not have recognized him if he saw him—he had no photographs of the boy—so he could only wonder about his features and size. What he knew of his grandson would have been compiled from the letters that came each month from Obaachan’s sister.

“How are you feeling?” Papa asked. “Do you need anything?”

“Tired. Completely exhausted,” Obaachan answered, adding that, no, she did not need anything.

“It was a long labor,” he said, looking down, obviously uncomfortable with the topic.

“Did you tell Mama that she has a grandson?”

“Oh, yes.” Mama couldn’t wait to meet him, Papa assured her. But it would be best to wait awhile before arranging a meeting, at least until Obaachan was out of the hospital.

Obaachan noted the look of concern on his face. “Is something wrong?”

“No, no. She’s just tired, I believe. She wanted to come to visit you, but I told her she must wait until you can bring the baby to her instead. It’s too much for her to come here. She can’t overdo things.”

“I’ll bring him as soon as I can. Tell her I’ll bring him soon.”

“I’ll be sure to let her know. I’ll leave you to rest now,” Papa said. He nodded slightly, put on his fedora hat, and smiled. “I’ll come back in the morning, after I get your mother’s breakfast and have my own. Good night.” He walked out the door, the baby went off with a nurse to the nursery ward, and Obaachan fell asleep.

My Ojichan did not return for several more days, and since my grandparents had not determined a name for their child, the boy remained nameless until my grandfather came back to Heart Mountain.

“We’d talked about it, but we hadn’t come up with a name,” Obaachan explains. “And I didn’t want to name him without your grandfather.” So she waited. She tried to adjust to the baby’s frequent feedings, tried not to be consumed by the many questions that raced through her mind. When was her husband coming home? What kind of future might her son have? Would he remain at Heart Mountain for years? Would he have the chance for a “normal” childhood?

How strange, overwhelming, and disillusioning my grandmother’s first experience with childbirth must have been. Not only was she shocked to discover how intensely painful labor could be, but even after she’d given birth, she was alone. Her mother was too ill to visit; her child had no name. And she would have known that my Ojichan had no idea that they had a son. She must have felt the miles and miles of rough Wyoming and Montana terrain that separated them. She must have wondered where he was.

At last Ojichan returned. Papa, having gotten wind of the returning work crew, had been waiting at the entrance to Heart Mountain to tell him the news. Ojichan rushed home, went to the bathrooms to shower and shave, and arrived in my grandmother’s hospital room fresh and clean, his curly hair still wet and his cheeks smelling of aftershave. He never would’ve gone straight to the hospital without cleaning up—for Ojichan, with his obsession with hygiene and appearance, to see his child for the first time in a state of filth not only would have been unsanitary, but a disgrace. So there he was, days after my grandmother had given birth, holding his new baby boy, pressing him against his chest, and smiling. He had waited so long for such a moment.

“Our son,” he whispered, looking at the small face and mess of black hair. He studied the baby’s features and was silent for a moment. “Charles,” he said decidedly, looking up at her with a slow smile. “We will call him Charles.” He pressed his lips to the boy’s forehead and beamed.

Although their last name was clearly identifiable as Japanese, my grandparents did not give any of their children Japanese first names. I think of Obaachan’s story from her adolescence, how she made up a fake name for herself when filling out forms for free makeup and toiletries because her real name “sounded too Japanese.” My grandfather had adopted an “American” name himself; no one knew him by the name his family had given him, but by the name he’d chosen in San Francisco. Considering the importance that Japanese families place on naming their children—and choosing the right characters for those names—the decision to break with that tradition must have been somewhat difficult.

Then again, perhaps it is not so surprising that my grandparents decided against Japanese names. Perhaps they saw American first names as a gesture toward showing their patriotism. Perhaps it was a way to protect their children a bit from the prejudice they would undoubtedly face, regardless of what their names were.

“Here,” Ojichan said, placing a small box into my grandmother’s hand. “I got you this in Montana.”

“Oh,” Obaachan said, surprised. She reached out her weakened arm. “What is it? You shouldn’t have bought me anything. I thought we were saving money for the baby …” As soon as she said the words, she knew she shouldn’t have done so. A flash of anger flickered like a shadow across my grandfather’s face. She quickly took the box in her hand. Ojichan was not fond of receiving advice, particularly of the financial sort.

“Just open it,” he said with a forced smile, one that failed to mask the initial emotion. “It’s for your birthday.”

Obaachan opened the box and gasped. Inside were a necklace and matching ring. They were very unusual: each had an ivory image with brown coloring that reminded her of the silhouette of tall grass along a river. The pendant hung on a delicate gold chain, and the ring was gold, too.

“They’re beautiful,” she murmured. “Thank you.”

She liked the gift very much, and it had been a long time since she had received any type of present. Since my grandfather had not given Obaachan a wedding ring, the necklace and ring would have been the first jewelry she ever received from him. And the set certainly was lovely. But this was the kind of gift that was both touching and frustrating. It appeared to be an expensive purchase, and although Obaachan appreciated her husband’s thoughtfulness, her practical side thought that a frivolous set of jewelry was not as important as having some money to help cover the expenses of a new child, especially since she would now be working less at the mess hall. It was also money that could have been saved, should they ever have the opportunity to leave Heart Mountain and start over. The jewelry, on the other hand, would not be of much use. She cringed when she thought of the waste.

Ojichan never did say a word about the money he was supposed to have earned in Montana; he just brought home a few gifts for my grandmother and the baby. She didn’t dare ask whether anything had happened to it, or to him. And rather than worry about it, she made up her mind to focus on the present, to take a mental photograph of those first few moments of her life as part of a “real” family, and to imprint the image into a space in her memory where it would not be swallowed up by so many hardships.

Chapter 13

I
T’S
S
EPTEMBER, AND ALTHOUGH SUMMER SHOULD BE
over here in Pennsylvania, it’s hot and humid, we’ve still had no frost, and the snapdragons at the front of my parents’ brick home remain in full bloom, their pinks and yellows tangled. I’m visiting for the weekend, standing at the island in their kitchen, looking over a large blue colander that can barely contain its mound of tomatoes so ripe their skin is bursting. My mother is scalding some of these tomatoes for canning, cooking them just long enough to make the skin come loose. My father has about sixty plants each year, much more than the two of them can ever eat—some primordial need to produce as much food as possible, I think—which means my mother spends late summer and early fall preserving everything she can. She looks up from her vat of boiling water, the steam lifting in a heavy white cloud, her face hot and tired, and says nonchalantly, easily, as if the words have no weight: “Your grandmother’s moving.”

I drop the tomato I’ve been holding back into the colander.

“Your aunt and uncle, they’re selling the house, and, well, she’ll be living somewhere else,” she continues.

“What do you mean she’s moving? What do you mean they’re selling the house?” I say, my tone just a little too strained to hide.